Does that sound crazy? Does it sound ideological, partisan, or close-minded.

I don’t think so.

Imagine if we said the same thing about tyrannies and democracies.

There are good tyrannies.

There are bad democracies.

Still, I’d prefer the worst democracy to the best tyranny.

Why?

Because even a badly run democracy is based on the principle of self rule. The government gets its right to make and enforce laws from the consent of the will of the governed.

Even if our representatives are corrupt and stupid, even if our federal, state and local agencies are mismanaged and disorganized – there is the potential for positive change.

In fact, the catalyst to that change is embedded in democracy, itself. Egalitarian systems founded on the principle of one person, one vote tend toward fairness, equity and liberty much more than others.

Bad leaders will be replaced. Bad functionaries will be retrained or superseded. Bad agencies will be renovated, renewed, and made to serve the will of the people.

However, in a tyranny, none of this is true.

Even if you have a benevolent tyrant who does nothing all day but try to do whatever is best for his or her subjects, that is a worse state of affairs.

Eventually the tyrant will change. Absolute power will corrupt him or her absolutely. Or even if this bastion of human goodness is incorruptible, he or she will eventually be deposed, replaced or die.

And there is nothing – absolutely nothing – to ensure the next tyrant is likewise benevolent. In fact, the system is set up to increase the likelihood that the next ruler will be as selfish, greedy and malevolent as possible.

This is because it is the system of tyranny, itself, that is corrupt – even if those that fill its offices are not.

If you can find a charter school that does none of these things – congratulations! You have found a diamond in the rough! But it is a diamond that is more likely to turn to coal the second you turn away.

Let’s say you find the rare charter school run by an elected school board. THEY AREN’T REQUIREDTO DO THAT. Organizers could at any time revert to an appointed board. Community members could be making all the decisions when you send your child to school, but by dismissal time they could have all been replaced with flunkies appointed by the private business people who took out the charter from the state in the first place!

Let’s say your charter school has open meetings and public documents. They invite the public to their deliberations. They take public comment and share all their internal communications with taxpayers and the media. THEY AREN’T REQUIREDTO DO THAT. They could close the doors any day they wanted. And there’s nothing you could do about it.

All these things that are optional at a charter school are required at public schools. Not just some public schools – ALL OF THEM!

Public schools are required to have elected school boards (unless taken over by the state). They are required to have open meetings and public documents. They are essentially democratic, whereas even the best charter schools are only democracies because of someone’s goodwill. When the wind changes, so will their system of government.

First of all, if the school doesn’t have open meetings and public documentation, you have no way of knowing whether these lotteries are fair and unbiased. Operators are often charged with cherry picking the best and brightest and denying students with disabilities or behavioral problems – they’ve even been known to discriminate based on race and class.

If a public school has a terrible school board, they can be replaced. In fact, they most certainly will be given time. With each bad policy and unpopular decision, bad school directors motivate taxpayers to vote them out.

23 thoughts on “The Best Charter School Cannot Hold a Candle to the Worst Public School”

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

And a couple of thousand years of history supports that quote. We can learn from history. Too bad so many people don’t make an effort to learn and keep making the same mistakes.

Trump, Bill Gates, Moskowitz, DeVose, Rhee, the Koch brothers, and too many others, are all ignorant fools ignoring what history has to teach them as they take their wrecking balls to the world repeating the same mistakes that have happened hundreds if not thousands of times over the millennia.

A social democracy: a socialist system of government achieved by democratic means.

The happiest countries are usually social democracies. The Nordic countries (i.e. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark), in particular, have their own system of Nordic capitalism, where socialist welfare policies slot, quite effectively, within a capitalist framework.

A number of Eastern European countries have since followed suit. The Asian Tiger economies (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore), in addition to Japan, have similarly adopted practices that could be considered social democracy.

Steve,
If you’re saying that there is fraud in education, and that there are sometimes bad people in positions of authority you’ll get no argument from me, but it cuts a wide swath across traditional public, public charters, and private schools. Just a couple of months ago the Superintendent of the Shakopee school district, a large suburban district south of Minneapolis was charged with embezzlement. In the case of the Oh Day Aki charter school it was under contract with Minneapolis Public Schools, and MPS was responsible for oversight.

Much of your article against charter schools centers around school boards, and while I agree with you that in most states the school board process is not good, in Minnesota charter boards are elected and voted on by its members, this is in state statute. In the majority of MN charters the board is made up of a majority of licensed teachers, then parents and community members – putting control in the hands of the people actually invested in the school.

You also mention that charter schools are not REQUIRED to have oversight, and this is not true Minnesota. The process is not perfect, and again bad people will always find ways to take advantage, but this is across all forms of schooling. MN charter schools are required to conduct annual audits and to make the findings public. Charter school authorizers are also required to conduct yearly reviews plus much more extensive reviews at contract renewal every five years.

As indicated in the attachment I shared with you charter schools in Minnesota are also required to have non-profit status. There is no profit made in charter schools in MN, in fact charters receive less per pupil than their traditional counterparts.

Steve, I am a strong supporter of public schools, both traditional and charter. I have worked in both and served on the school boards of both. I have also seen the good, the bad and the ugly of both traditional and charter schools. I know from experience that charter schools fill an unmeet need for many students and parents that they couldn’t find in their traditional school. There are a lot of students and parents who would strongly disagree with you when you say that the public charter school that made a difference in their lives doesn’t hold a candle to the traditional public school that they originally attended.

Peter, I am not expecting everyone to agree with me. That will never happen no matter what I say. This is my opinion backed up with facts. MN passed the first charter school law in 1991 and the first charter was opened in St Paul in 1992. It makes sense that the state would have more thoughtful charter laws since you have the longest history with these types of schools. However, these sorts of scandals I’ve highlighted are because of lack of oversight. I’m surprised you can’t see that. I’m not going to go into each one and prosecute the cases one-by-one. But you are wrong to say MN charter schools have all the amenities of public schools. If they did, they wouldn’t be charter schools. They would be public schools. I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that charter schools are public. Yes, they are funded with taxpayer money. But that is where the similarity ends.

The vast majority of charter schools in Wisconsin are also run by public school boards. All charter schools in Virginia and Kansas are run by public school boards. State law varies so much that it is difficult to make sweeping generalizations about charter schools.

Once again we have Teaching Economist to spread rumors and propaganda. Sir, you say – without any evidence – that charters in certain states have (elected?) school boards. Okay. Let’s say you’re right. So what? They don’t have to do that. They could take away those elected boards tomorrow. We deserve schools that are REQUIRED to listen to the voters and taxpayers – not just those that do it today out of the goodness of their hearts. I say again – I’ll take imperfect democracy over perfect tyranny any day.

See? THAT’s propaganda. Traditional public schools cannot lose their elected boards unless taken over by the state. There are a very limited set of circumstances in which that can happen. And even if it does, it must be only temporary. However, at charter schools this can happen at any time for whatever reason and they usually don’t even have to explain the change to voters and taxpayers.

You are wrong. First of all, there is a public school in Mesa where parents would camp over night to get their kid in it. Since so many wanted their kids in that school, they expanded to 4 schools. If a charter school has more kids who want to attend, they will expand their school. If a charter school continue to having to expand, you know it is a good school just like the public school I mentioned. Btw, the public school I mentioned, teaches at a higher level then a regular public school. Some children can not keep up and the school suggest putting their child in another school.
Most of the charter schools ut perform public schools. If they do not, they end up closing because parents do not want to put their child in a low performing school. Fortunately in Arizona, parents are able to put their child in a school outside their district. One charter school in Arizona is a on line school where 13 and 14 yr. olds are graduating h.s. And going onto college another charter school has their campuses at Ommunity colleges so by the time the kid graduate from h.s., they also have an associates degree.
“Best High Schools in the U.S.” Arizona charter schools own the list. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/national-rankings

Pls, you just told me about two charter schools that buck the trend. And it’s not even evidence. It’s all anecdotal. But even if you’re right, you’re ignoring the point. You say this one magical charter expanded to meet demand. GREAT! They don’t have to and hardly any charters ever do that. I’ll take the school that is REQUIRED to accept my child and not the one that today does the right thing but tomorrow could change its mind. You mention one charter in Arizona with amazing outcomes. Super! When you cherry pick students, you can do that. Let me go around my state hand picking my students and based on outcomes I’ll be the best teacher in the state. But that’s not teaching. It’s cheating.

The reality is that charter schools do NOT outperform public schools. The most rigorous and most expensive study of charter
school performance commissioned by the US Department of Education found no overall positive effect for charter schools. Studies that purport to have found urban charters produce higher academic outcomes—cleverly phrased as differences in “days of learning”—for African American and
Latino students in urban communities rely on questionable methodology.

The reality is that more charter schools fail than public schools leaving students in the lurch. As the Center for Media and Democracy has calculated, nearly 2,500 charter schools have shuttered between 2001 and 2013, affecting 288,000 American children enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and the failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools.

You need to be more precise and specific. Your enjoyable and justified rant applies to *independent* charter schools. There’s a whole bunch of amazing schools that are run as affiliated charters, i.e. under school district supervision but with added community participation through an elected and transparent Brown Act adhering board. We’re also called charters but with all the good stuff of public schools and none of the bad stuff of independent charters, and we’d like to keep our brand intact and not thrown in with the independents.

Oliver, thanks for the comment, but I fundamentally disagree with you. I know some folks in the school privatization industry are trying to distinguish themselves from the worst grifters in the field who every day hurt kids educations and steal from taxpayers. But the problem isn’t limited to the worst practitioners. The problem is the charter school model, itself. We give you extra freedoms that traditional public schools do not enjoy. If those freedoms help, we should extend them to all public schools. If they endanger educational outcomes and self-rule, we should not allow them. If your school allows taxpayers an elected school board, great! But it doesn’t have to. You could take it back any day. Call me crazy, but I think our kids and taxpayers deserve schools that are REQUIRED to listen to their concerns – not just schools that do so out of good will. Imperfect democracy is always better than perfect tyranny.

I do not know about other states but in MN elected school boards are required for charter schools in state statute https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=124E.07, and in WI the vast majority of charter schools are the instrumentalities of their home districts, they have governance boards made up of community members, but they still report to the locally elected school board.

Board bylaws shall outline the process and procedures for changing the board’s governance structure, consistent with chapter 317A. A board may change its governance structure only:

(1) by a majority vote of the board of directors and a majority vote of the licensed teachers employed by the school as teachers, including licensed teachers providing instruction under a contract between the school and a cooperative; and

[…] Public schools provide a better alternative because the funding must be dedicated to the student, living within a district’s coverage area guarantees enrollment, the school must be managed by an elected school board with open meetings and a plethora of other amenities you won’t find at a privatized institution. But at least the charter school is a school! […]

[…] The charter schools that claim to be the most “public” still have secrets; policies, practices, and long term goals conceived and held behind closed doors. The schemers control the surface narrative as well as the hidden narrative. What allows schemers to have such unbridled influence is the regulatory policies (or lack thereof) written into charter school laws. As Steven Singer has shown, “The Best Charter School Cannot Hold a Candle to the Worst Public School.” […]